Same, outrageous

It’s funny how you pick up elements of your parents personalities, even without trying.  I think most of my personality traits mimic my mom but I have a few from my dad for sure like my general annoyance with the world, full moon mood swings and a flash temper that can be quite ugly. 

When we were at my mom’s for New Year’s, I mentioned how once I wake up in the morning I have a hard time falling back to sleep.  My mom is the same way.  My mom generally likes to keep busy, as do I.  My “get whatever has to be done, done” attitude comes from her as well.  Neither of us like to put off a job that is at hand.  Get it done, then relax. There are many little quirks that I seem to have inherited from mom.

One thing mom and I do not share is the same viewpoint on health as she has been a smoker for as long as I can remember.  I remember trying to hide her cigarettes as a kid so she wouldn’t smoke.  In a weird way, her smoking is probably a big reason I never started because of how much I wanted her to stop.  Sadly my brother picked up smoking as well once he entered adulthood.

  She also is not a real believer in routine exercise outside of whatever she gets at work.  However when she was younger she was much more active, she used to run, farther than I can now and also do stuff like play tennis.  She developed some back problems and instead of  moving to different types of exercise that didn’t aggravate her back, she sort of resigned herself to just not exercising.  She always has been a pretty careful eater so she never fell into the oh so typical adult fat ass stage. 

It’s funny how I never really saw any similarities with my parents until I was well into adulthood.  Maybe you just don’t think about these thiings when you are younger, there are just better things to do. 

I saw in the news that Barry Zito, a pitcher that just signed with the Giants was paid an incredible 126 million, 7 year contract.  Wow that is a hell of a lot of money.  I hardly follow baseball anymore but I know who Zito is but what I didn’t know were his 2006 stats.  The guy was 16-10 with an ERA a little under 4 (3.83)!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What in the hell is going on?  How does a guy with those stats command that sort of money?  It is crazy what has happened to the salary structure.  Someone figured out that he will earn approximately 5,000 for each PITCH he throws.  That is just disgusting.  I rememeber when I followed baseball passionately in the 70’s and early 80’s, a “good” pitcher had an era of under 2.50 and had 20 wins.  I can’t believe this guy got paid so much.